Last week, Newt Gingrich jumped on the far right-wing crazy train over plans to build a Muslim community center near the 9/11 site in New York City. He's weirdly putting forth, “There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia.” Then last night on Faux News, he called NYC Mosque supporters "hostile to our civilization," as if freedom of religion wasn't one of the core values of the Founders of this nation. Gingrich is following a familiar pattern of right-wing demagogues before him. For Joe McCarthy it was communists; for Benito Mussolini it was trade unionists; for Pol Pot and Mao Tse Tzung it was people who had an education or knew how to read. In every case, the pattern is the same. Identify a minority, claim that they're a super-evil force with supernatural powers to destroy the nation, and then use the hate and fear for them that you've helped whip up to grab your own political power. In Newt's case, he's hoping his fear-mongering about the world's largest religion will cause people to forget that he handed divorce papers to his second wife - who had been his high-school math teacher - when she was coming out of anesthesia after cancer surgery, and that his third wife is the House staffer he was having sex with in the back room in the Capitol between his excursions to the floor of the House to lead the prosecution of Bill Clinton for having sex with a consenting adult. Will it work? So far, Faux News groupies are lapping it up. But will Newt succeed in fooling the rest of America? Newt was my congressman back in the days when he was going after Clinton and I lived in Georgia, and he left Congress because he couldn't even fool his own constituents. I'm betting this latest gambit won't gain much traction beyond Fox News groupies.